Peabody Terrace and the Mixed Legacy of Modernist Urban Planning
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concrete against communities Peabody Terrace and the mixed legacy of Modernist urban planning garrett dash nelson 17 April 2007 Harvard College Literature & Arts B-20 Professor Alex Krieger Nelson 1 Architect and critic Robert Campbell was at a party in the Riverside neighborhood when a friend of his remarked: “Oh, Riverside is such a pleasant little neighborhood—tree- shaded streets, and small houses, and all that—except for those three ugly concrete towers that Harvard has just built.”1 Not long after, in the definitive annal of Harvard’s architectural legacy, Bainbridge Bunting and Margaret Henderson Floyd praised “one of the most suc- cessful contemporary buildings at Harvard and perhaps the best thing the Sert office has done.”2 Both Campbell’s friend and Bunting and Floyd were referring to the same building: Peabody Terrace, Harvard’s 1963 paean to Modernist optimism and a building complex whose admiration by designers is matched only by its detestation by its neighbors. Perhaps no better example exists of “a building beloved by architects and disliked by almost everyone else.”3 The design of Peabody Terrace represents to many academics an exemplar of brilliant city planning on a micro-scale. In its tiny parcel of land, it masterfully incorporates and ap- propriates the lessons of the century of design and planning that preceded its construction. Its form, layout, and architecture were specifically oriented with the considerations of its surrounding community in mind, and it was built with a high-minded academic confidence in planning’s ability to incorporate social design into a harmonious built environment. Its principal designer, Josep Lluís Sert, the former dean of the Graduate School of Design and the founder of its urban design program, is widely regarded amongst planners and architects as a scion of the enlightened design strategies that grew out of the postwar celebration of better cities through better theories. “Cities,” he argued, “are the cradle’s of man’s progress 1 Campbell, Robert, “Why Don’t the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architects Like?”, Bulletin of the Ameri- can Academy of Arts and Sciences (Summer 2004): 22. 2 Bunting, Bainbridge and Margaret Henderson Floyd, Harvard: An Architectural History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985), 267. 3 Campbell, 22. Nelson 2 and have fostered knowledge in every form.”4 Peabody Terrace rises from an intellectual manifest intimately intertwined with the hopeful faith in good design that impelled Jeffer- son’s gridded rationalism, Olmsted’s interleaved parks, and Burnham’s grand concourses. It is, in many ways, the built evidence of the high-water mark of urban optimism at Harvard— risk-taking, assertive, and fringed with a bit of hubris. In its concrete fenestrations, louvered balconies, and porous axes, the heady posturing of urban design takes concrete form. And yet to almost all those who are unfamiliar with the lusty academic arguments be- hind city planning—those for whom communities are simply lived in, rather than thought about—Peabody Terrace is reviled and lamented, assailed as ugly and inhumane. It has been accused of being “monstrous,” “cold,” “uninviting,” “overwhelming,” and “hostile,” and some unflatteringly draw out a comparison to “Soviet housing.”5 Its presence still embitters Riverside residents against Harvard even forty years after its construction.6 How, then, to reconcile this dramatic disjoint between the clergy and the laypeople of urban planning? How can it be that those who study the planned environment of Peabody Terrace come to such different conclusions as those who inhabit it? And how could the undeniably well- intentioned, well-informed, and well-executed plan of Peabody Terrace have turned out to miss its objectives by so much? The addition of new married-student housing to the southeastern corner of Harvard’s campus came at the center of President Nathan Marsh Pusey’s ambitious Program for Har- vard College, an enormous capital investment program from 1958 to 1971 that signaled not only the expanded needs of the university, but “the changed condition of Harvard.”7 Pe- 4 Quoted in Torres, Andrew Michael, From Avant-Garde to Harvard Yard: José Luis Sert, Urban Design, and Harvard University (Cambridge: Harvard University Department of the History of Science, 2002), 54. 5 Gewertz, Ken, “Making Harvard Modern,” The Harvard University Gazette (9 October 2003), http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/10.09/09-sert.html. 6 Hurley, Mary, “Down by Riverside, a Feud Runs Through It,” (2 February 2003): 10. 7 Bunting, 230. Nelson 3 abody Terrace was envisioned as a community for Harvard’s growing married graduate stu- dent population and a counterpart to the “Harvard style” of river housing that dominated the Charles riverfront. It would retain the courtyard features for which Harvard housing complexes were famous but update their execution for the modern period, by “defining the quadrangles following the traditional pattern and providing vertical accents that in some ways recall the old towers.”8 But the project could neither feasibly nor desirably copy-and-paste the existing Har- vard housing stock. Peabody Terrace was constructed five years earlier than its present-day neighbor, Mather House, and so it represented a slender finger of protrusion of Harvard’s campus from Dunster House, the university’s southeastern border at the time. This exten- sion of Harvard land intruded into a neighborhood far different in character from what Harvard needed in its new housing complex. Riverside was (and remains today) a commu- nity of small multi-family and single-family houses, few more than three stories, mostly dat- ing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and built largely in a picturesque Victorian style. Most importantly—as evidenced in the neighborhood’s very name—the community was crucially linked to the Charles River and Memorial Drive, the central rec- reational and aesthetic destination for the residents of the neighborhood. Gridded, tree- lined streets—the stuff of Campbell’s friend’s wistfulness and the much-desired archetype of the American community then and today—made up the bulk of Riverside’s urban layout. Separated from the bustle of both Harvard and Central Squares, outside the margin of the university, and made up of a lower-middle-class but very community-oriented demographic, Riverside residents enjoyed their neighborhood as it was: perhaps somewhat run-down, but human-scaled and traditional. Into this neighborhood Harvard hoped to inject a housing complex whose economy dictated high density and whose stature demanded ambitious modern design. The university 8 Josep Lluis Sert: His Work and Ways (Tokyo: Process Architecture, 1982), 96. Nelson 4 simply could not build at the existing scale of the neighborhood, as it had hundreds of new students in urgent need of housing, and to place them all in low-slung Victorian-Colonial bungalows would have meant buying up much of the city of Cambridge. All of Harvard’s housing had, until this point, been exclusively concerned with the needs of Harvard stu- dents. The new building would retain some of this selfishness; Harvard intended the project an extension of its campus and “the architects considered it essential to consolidate the site by eliminating all vehicular through-traffic” through the closure of Sterling and Banks Streets.9 Meanwhile, however, Harvard’s new role as intruder into neighborhoods that had previously been insulated from institutional growth meant that the university now reluc- tantly had to consider community concerns it had previously been able to ignore. Progressive Architecture summarized the design challenge as follows: On the one hand, the architects were asked to tie the project into the comparatively low scale of the neighborhood, but at the same time to supply the much higher density required by the university; to open the new spaces to the neighborhoods, while still shielding the views from the often dilapidated environment; to open a sequence of spaces and pedestrian walks to river- front recreation areas not only for the tenants but but also for the townspeople, but to effect this without encroaching on the privacy of those living in the apartments; and finally, to place the high-rise units so as not to ‘obscure the sky’, while still establishing their spatial relation- ship to each other.10 Sert hoped that the dilemma could be solved by the application of the new principles of ‘urban design’, a term that he “more or less coined,” and a discipline with which he was intimately familiar.11 The design of the new complex, Sert believed, should begin with the neighborhood and grow from there. Its architecture should not consider only the land 9 “Harvard’s New Married-Student Housing,” Progressive Architecture (December 1964), 130. 10 Ibid., 132. 11 Campbell, Robert. “Harvard Exhibitions Showcase Sert as the Soul of Collaboration,” The Boston Globe (12 October 2003): N2. Nelson 5 within its own parcel, but reference the neighborhood around it. Incorporating one of the first social studies of urban life, Sert observed how the residents of Riv- erside interacted with the Charles River and the area where Peabody Terrace would be sited, considering pedestrian patterns, perceptions of height and space, and nodes of congregation. Site plan showing in red the deliberate pedestrian routes Out of this academic ferment came a design planned from the community to the river. painted in the broad strokes of the academic ambitions of urban design. Instead of walling off the river behind gated courtyards of brick in the fash- ion of Eliot House and Winthrop House, Peabody Terrace would remain ‘porous’ to the surrounding community. Its courtyards and balconies would be designed specifically to wel- come in those in the neighborhoods and to encourage intermingling between the students and the residents. “Again it was very important to consider the environment and ties [...] with the city of Cambridge,” commented Sert on the design of the complex.